<Begin Segment 22>

TI: Finishing up this -- you mentioned how you helped Bob Kennedy get elected as New York senator. Were you working on his campaign to become president in 1968?

CS: No, I was on the... and incidentally, I helped him in his New York senatorial campaign only in the sense that I was on the staff, and what I did, I was merely recording or reporting his speeches so that he could review them after he made speeches. But I was part of the press corps on his campaign. When he was running for president, I was on the King County Superior Court, and I was then prohibited by law in the State of Washington from engaging in partisan political activities. When Bob came to Seattle, I could not go to a public event where he appeared, because it would have been a violation of the code of judicial conduct. But his secretary called me and arranged for me to privately meet with him, so I had a chance to meet with him privately when he was here in Seattle. And it was a week later -- about a week later -- that he was in Los Angeles and he was assassinated. But I had an arrangement with my family that if he had called me and asked me to serve on his campaign, I would have resigned from the court and served on his campaign.

TI: I mean, it must have been not only the assassination of Robert Kennedy, but also Martin Luther King. That must have been a, a horrible year.

CS: Yeah, and in the sense, although interestingly enough, my reaction to the assassination of Bob Kennedy is much more intense than my reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., even though I knew Martin King and I knew his father and mother quite well -- in fact, Martin Luther King, Jr. did his pastoral internship at the church in Philadelphia where I was Minister of Youth Education, pastored by Dr. Gray, William H. Gray, Jr. But, so I, I had known Martin Luther King, Jr. as he was growing up, his high school, college and all of that, but I did not have the same intense emotional connection with him that I had with Bob Kennedy. Bob Kennedy, I literally lived with and worked with on an intense basis for over a period of four years, and I knew what he was thinking, how he reacted to things, and I would see him in his family environment, I'd see him in the political environment, and I'd see him making decisions and questioning people and demanding work and this kind of thing. And to see that over a four-year period of time, you come to a position where you react much more strongly to an untimely death like an assassination, than you would to someone who's not that close to you. But it is true that both those assassinations occurred in the same year, and I, I don't apologize for the fact that I don't have the intense reaction to Martin Luther King's assassination as I do to Bob Kennedy's.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.